Actors You Wouldn't Expect to Star in Baseball Movies but Did

These are the guys they cast when Tom Hanks, Jimmy Stewart, Kevin Costner and Gary Cooper weren't available.

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Anthony Perkins, Fear Strikes Out (1957)

He was much more believable as Norman Bates than he was as a baseball hero.

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William Bendix, The Babe Ruth Story (1948)

Bendix was actually quite adept at playing cops, criminals, and of course, Chester A. Riley. The Babe was just not in his wheelhouse.

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Robert DeNiro, Bang The Drum Slowly (1972)

And he spoke with a drawl, too.

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Ronald Reagan, The Winning Team (1952)

He actually comes off more like a future president than a ballplayer. Maybe that's because his character was named after Grover Cleveland.

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Ray Milland, It Happens Every Spring (1949)

Milland was probably an OK choice for the character he played, a college professor who invents a chemical that causes baseballs to avoid bats and allows him to become a star pitcher in the major leagues.

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(BORDERLINE) Robert Redford, The Natural (1984)

This one makes the list because Redford was 48 years old when this film was released. Redford would have been a great choice -- one might even say a "natural" -- if it had been made in the 60's. But by '84 he was a bit long in the tooth for a guy playing a kid from out of nowhere who becomes a baseball phenom.